Their billing dashboard provides a nice breakdown https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/ https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/ and compares to

Their billing dashboard provides a nice breakdown https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/ https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/ and compares to your previous month You are in a dynamic environment, a relatively static environment, or a mix of the two. For static environments you should be buying reserved instances in year long blocks to save yourself the premium of on-demand pricing. For dynamic environments are you really using services by the month? We scale with load and wouldn't care about monthly costs shown on their pricing page. In our situation, a mix, we have year long reserved instances (some 3 years) and our scalability is on-demand or spot instances which changes, and is never monthly. Some months we have only a couple of days of on-demand use, other months it could be a week or 2. If we are getting to the point where there is a lot of dynamic use we add another reserved instance to the base cluster. So I understand your frustration about monthly pricing for a quick glance, however the real world use of 'monthly' hosting is the least applicable in Amazon's eyes. Bandwidth costs I hear you. Would love to not charge clients bandwidth, and we typically don't charge unless its over, coincidentally, 1 TB For my personal DO servers for side projects/moonlighting, I wish they offered reserved year long pricing like Amazon.